We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.
Best Original Score
The nominees are:
All Quiet on the Western Front
Babylon
The Banshees of Inisherin
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans
I said this last year, but it is exciting to watch the Music Branch of the Academy expand its thinking on the Original Score category. Gone are the days of cut and paste strings and horns blaring over everything, telegraphing every action or emotion. And, good riddance. What we have instead are much more nuanced, interesting, and experimental works that nonetheless complement their films wonderfully.
This year, we have a brilliant jazz composer, two electronica artists known for their experimentation and highly successful in the world of pop music, and none other than the best composer in film today. The Academy still found space to nominate, for the 53rd time, one of its legends who is mostly playing the hits at this point, but with the variety of the other nominees, who can find time to complain?
Babylon – I put on the Babylon Original Score this morning just to listen to it, and I have had “Voodoo Mama,” probably its most recognizable track, stuck in my head ever since. If you have seen the trailer, you know the track. If you have seen the movie, then you know how well it is deployed. Babylon is an epic work of mad genius by director Damien Chazelle, and the same could be said of the score, written by Chazelle’s Harvard roommate, Justin Hurwitz.
Hurtwitz is one of the best young composers on the scene, and it is almost unfathomable to think of the work we have yet to hear from him. So far, he has only worked on Chazelle’s films, writing all those supposed jazz standards at the heart of Whiplash, winning Oscars for Score and Song for La La Land, and composing the doomy, atmospheric tones of First Man. It feels like the sky’s the limit for Hurwitz and we’re all just along for the ride.
All Quiet on the Western Front – Three tones. That’s all it takes for composer Volker Bertelmann, credited under the stage name Hauschka, to evoke endless reservoirs of dread. The first time it kicks in on the soundtrack, you wonder if something has gone terribly wrong with the film. This is not the kind of score we have grown accustomed to for prestige war pictures. This is darker, more aggressive, impossibly angry. It is the sound of the machinery of conflict dispatching one victim after another. It is, frankly, terrifying.
Hauschka, who has had a long successful career as an experimental electronic musician, has taken to feature composing without missing a beat. He often works with noted American composer Dustin O’Halloran, and together, they were nominated for this award in 2016 for Lion. This time around, Hauschka is going at it alone, and the results are some of the most spectacular work of the year.
Everything Everywhere All at Once – From one successful experimental musician to a trio, Son Lux is the electronica group credited with composing the score for the Daniels’ sci-fi mish mash. As the film moves from melodrama to kung-fu to multiverse action-comedy, the score matches it beat for beat, tone for tone. It is a fascinating work, pulling from a vast array of genres and incorporating a wide assortment of instruments to arrive at the eclectic, if schizophrenic, place it lands. If nothing else, this nomination is evidence of how far the Music Branch has come from the traditional strings and horns arrangements of old.
The Fabelmans – Speaking of which, we come to the second-most nominated person in the history of the Academy Awards. Second behind no less a luminary than Walt Disney himself, we have longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator and all-around legend John Williams. This is his 53rd Academy Award nomination, and not to say Williams isn’t one of the best ever to do it – he is – but at this point, he is getting nominations just to show up to work.
His score for The Fabelmans is fine, but I promise you it is breaking no new ground. It is, perhaps, one of the master’s most restrained scores, leaning on a set of tinkling piano refrains, but it’s nothing we haven’t heard before. The Music Branch likes to find its people and just nominate them over and over – we’re going to talk about this problem next time when we discuss Original Song. Since 2010, Williams has worked on 12 films, and he has received eight nominations. He’s a legend, but it’s time to open the doors for a new generation.
The Banshees of Inisherin – I won’t pretend to be impartial here, and I’ve said it before on the site: Carter Burwell is the best composer working in film today. That has been the case going back at least to his work on Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges in 2008 and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man in 2009. Honestly, he probably put his stamp on the film composition world with his brilliant work on the Coens’ Fargo back in 1996. It has simply been decade after decade of accomplishment.
Every score of his is instantly recognizable as a Burwell work – in the way of early Williams or Thomas Newman – but they are all distinct and specific to their films. Here, he avoids the traditional Irish instrumentation one might expect in favor of something more haunting and universal. It’s a masterclass in underplaying the emotion. Burwell isn’t telling us how to feel, rather he is helping make us feel something. Unbelievably, this is just Burwell’s third nomination, following Carol and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. If there is justice in the Oscars world, he will win this award someday.
The final analysis
Hurwitz’s Babylon score is the showiest work of the bunch and has certainly picked up its fair share of accolades throughout the Oscars season. It is the one of this bunch that most screams for attention – in a good way, in a way that makes sense within the narrative in which it appears. The only thing that could potentially prevent a win here is that voters just like the other movies better overall.
Babylon is the only film in this category not nominated for Best Picture, but it’s unclear how much that matters. Since 2000, just three films have won Best Original Score without a corresponding Best Picture nomination – Soul, The Hateful Eight, and Frida – but Soul was a popular movie about music and The Hateful Eight was a (well deserved) career award for Ennio Morricone. That said, as a previous winner, Hurwitz is in the club, and the power of his work will likely be enough to carry the day.
Will win: Babylon
Should win: All Quiet on the Western Front
Should have been here: TÁR
A note about my favorite snub: Hildur Guðnadóttir’s work on TÁR is without parallel this year. It is the perfect brooding accompaniment to everything director Todd Field is trying to accomplish. The Music Branch likely felt the score relied too much on the classic composers with whom the central character is obsessed (Mahler, first and foremost), but there is no mistaking the tremendous work Guðnadóttir puts into every second of music she composes for this film.
Next time: Original Song
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